Such continuing racism at the geographical heart of the Holocaust, I’m afraid, also exposes the fact that, for all the exhibitions and memorials Europe has erected to the memory of the Nazis’ victims, it has still not properly come to terms with what took place.
Poland, indeed, has rewritten history by casting itself as a principal victim of the Nazis along with the Jews, and denies any complicity in their extermination.
Yet, although it is a fact that Poland was invaded by the Nazis, who imprisoned and killed many of its citizens, other Poles savagely assisted in atrocities against the Jews — and continued massacring them even after the end of the war.
More broadly, I would argue that Holocaust education has signally failed to prevent widespread anti-semitism in Europe — not least because of several countries’ continuing state of denial about their past complicity in such crimes.
Anti-Jewish hatred is now running at epidemic levels in Hungary. There are repeated violent attacks on Jews in France and Sweden. Conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media or U.S. presidents are now commonplace in British public life.
And everywhere Israel is irrationally blamed for abuses of which it is itself the victim not the perpetrator, in a horrible echo of the deranged prejudice against the Jews that led to Auschwitz...Can't wait to see how Canada's shrine to victimhood, a.k.a. the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, is going to explain it all. That's sarcasm, of course, since the subject of victims (the Poles: victims of Hitler; the Ukrainians: victims of Stalin) numbering among the hateful is too much of a hot potato to ever show up in the mausoleum's simplistic and sanctimonious corridors.
Update: The last days of the Jews in Islamicized Europe
1 comment:
Actually, I understand Poles were selectively targetted by the Nazis. Certainly, the Nazis went after Polish universities & their professors. Don't know if this happened in such a way in - say - Czechoslovakia. Nazis saw all Slavs as inferior beings and treated them as such; perhaps they saw the Poles as rivals.
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